


Lords of Kobol, Hear These Five Prayers

by orphan_account



Category: Battlestar Galactica (2003), Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fusion, Community: artword, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-03-04
Updated: 2007-03-04
Packaged: 2017-10-05 09:38:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,852
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/40272
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Lords of Kobol, watch over John Sheppard and hear his prayers.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Lords of Kobol, Hear These Five Prayers

**Author's Note:**

> Gorgeous covers by [](http://slodwick.livejournal.com/profile)[**slodwick**](http://slodwick.livejournal.com/). Written for an [](http://community.livejournal.com/artword/profile)[**artword**](http://community.livejournal.com/artword/) challenge.

 

**One.**  
John Sheppard is the CAG aboard the battlestar _Galactica_. He's at his happiest when in the confined cockpit of a Viper, twirling against a backdrop of stars and soundless explosions, eking out every last drop of power and manoeuvrability from the archaic but robust Mark II. Jinking to avoid enemy fire, flipping quick, vertical one-eighties, and pinning down Raiders in his cross-hairs before slicing through their arcing wings with incendiary 20mm rounds and puncturing the fuselages which light up in brilliant fireballs; ironically, it is here he feels safest. In flight, survival is based on his skills as a pilot, and those of his squadron mates. On the large ships he never feels entirely in control of his own life, as the political and social unrest that jostles the fleet like a toxic undercurrent waxes and wanes around him, leaving tangible marks of spilled blood.

Battles should be fought by warriors, he thinks, by those trained and equipped to do so against very real threats, not people who are simply tired and unhappy and seeking targets for their frustrations. During every pre-mission briefing he voices this sentiment and drums it into his pilots. _The Cylons are the enemy, not each other_. He wishes he could shout it out to the whole fleet, or at least convince Elizabeth Weir to preach a more eloquent version of the message in her next presidential press conference. It's unlikely. The last time they spoke, President Weir told Sheppard that the people were aware of the distinction between the _good guys_ and the _bad guys_, and that to imply otherwise was patronising. "Before the attack I was a diplomat, John, not a schoolteacher. I will not address Colonial citizens as if they are children."

"Not even the kids?"

"Especially not the children," she replied with a half-smile. "I know they are our greatest commodity at this time, with the entire human population packed into this worryingly small fleet, but they are treated too much like commodities. Packaged and taught and moulded into their roles on board their ships. I want to give them more choice, and the opportunity to think for themselves. I will not talk down to them, and they will vote for me when they are old enough."

"Politics, huh." Politics got people killed in ways John had no means of defending against. It had been made clear to John that in the arena of politics his simple words were ineffective, and his gun unwanted.

"Yes, John. Politics."

John left Weir's office on Colonial One with no plans to listen to her Talk Wireless broadcast later on that day. He knew she would repeat most of the little speech she had given him. Lines agreed with her aide, Grodin, and learnt verbatim. There must be an election coming up; there was always an election of some kind looming. John would vote for whoever could keep his birds in the air.

The broadcast was postponed as a constellation of Cylon ships appeared on DRADIS: three basestars disgorging their complement of Raiders. One of the smaller ships was still being refuelled after an accident left it with mere dregs of tylium. The rest of the fleet jumped away, leaving _Galactica_ to protect the refinery ship and _Kimba Huta_ until the freighter is restocked with enough fuel to make the jump. Admiral O'Neill ordered the launch of the attack Vipers, and John is heading into the skirmish.

He hears the urgency in his voice as he barks orders to the rest of the squadron, and feels the electric sizzle of adrenaline in his blood, heightening his concentration and lowering his reaction times to blistering, near-psychic rates. Despite the chaos, there's an order to his thoughts, a rational, repetitive system that keeps him alive. _Observation, analysis, reaction._ Cycled through in the blink of an eye, but a methodical approach nonetheless. He sees the arena of the dogfight in terms of geometry and dynamics. Angles. Vectors. Swooping curves round an invisible axis, where the equations describing Cylon ships and Viper ammunition meet at the centre, the origin of victory.

His wingman, Teyla, marks him precisely, deftly weaving her craft through the fray and picking off Raiders with tight, accurate bursts of fire. John scratches two Cylons and calls the squadron to reconvene closer to _Galactica_ and the two other ships. A defensive rather than offensive strategy, with a view to a hasty retreat when the refuelling is finished. He absorbs the data of the dogfight, projecting optimum flight paths and tactically sound manoeuvres, but the nuggets are scattered and panicking, and their chaotic flight lines are like a child's crayon scribble. There is a bright flash to John's starboard side, and he loses another pilot.

The Raiders, on the other hand, follow John's predicted paths in the battle, their machine minds churning through millions of calculations to compute probabilities and execute statistically favourable moves. It's eerie. These identical, factory produced conglomerates of alloys and biomatter may be on their maiden flights yet their programming gives them a better grasp of multi-step tactical thinking than all John's years of experience. He makes his decisions based not only on current configurations of craft, but likely future patterns, like good chess game strategies.

The machines are better; their velocities are more controlled, their angles more precise. Their aim deadlier. Human unpredictability and ingenuity is all that keeps John's pilots alive against this foe, but human unpredictability is what's getting his nuggets decimated as they veer into the sights of opportunistic Raiders that are hounding other targets; drift solo instead of coordinating their attack with the flock; fall to friendly fire, panic, mistakes, inexperience, arrogance, humanness.

The refuelling is done and the Vipers return to _Galactica_. The ships jump and rejoin the rest of the fleet with minimal casualties sustained.

The next time John stands at the podium in the briefing room, looking at his cohort of fighter jockeys, his planned speech dies on his lips. He sees in the pilots' eyes all the aspects of their battle deaths, premonitions of fallibility.

"I'm not going to train you any more," he says, feeling like his words are a betrayal when he intends them as a means of survival. "I'm going to program you."

 

**Two.**  
John Sheppard stands in the middle of a pyramid court, ball in hand, squinting as he looks up at the bright Caprican sky. It's almost time for another dose of ant-radiation meds, but his twitching muscles demand a longer workout. He closes his eyes and the dilapidation disappears; he is no longer surrounded by bomb-blasted buildings, scorched and tilted, no longer in a court delineated by makeshift walls cobbled together from uneven wooden boards. He's in the Buccaneers' stadium, the roar of the crowd making his blood tingle.

It starts. He weaves and lunges and sidesteps, bouncing the ball violently off the walls and lobbing it towards the goal. It's a dance with an imaginary partner, and she is still so far away. Yet again his training is interrupted with images of Teyla, crouched near the apex of the triangular court, poised for the face-off. The memory is replayed in his game as he sees her mark him perfectly, blocking his shots on goal, feinting to the left then twisting round to catch him off balance and deftly taking the ball to score an equalising point.

Smaller and more agile than him, Teyla made a very skilled opponent for the few games they played together, and a passionate and enticing lover for the few nights they stayed together. John sits down in the dust, his gaze returning to the sky.

Sometimes it feels like _Galactica_ is there, just out of sight, with Teyla on board. She promised, after all. Promised that she'd come back to take him and the rest of the resistance fighters off this toaster-infested rock. He remembers what she said of the Cylons before she returned to the fleet: "We will fight them until we cannot." It's what he's been doing on Caprica; hitting munitions dumps and armouries for supplies, attacking any Centurion troops that march too close to resistance territory, and executing raids and bombings in skinjob-occupied Caprica City. It's something, but it's not enough. _Galactica_ is the key to winning the war, not just occasional battles. Top of the league or a few victories in the playoffs; it's not a difficult choice to make.

John knows Teyla will return for him. He drops the ball in the centre of the court before heading off to get his meds. Maybe the next time he comes out she'll be there, taking potshots at the goal, with a smile and a game and a kiss for him, and a nuke for the Cylons.

 

**Three.**  
John Sheppard is a Viper pilot aboard the battlestar _Galactica_, but he is often so drunk he rarely shows his face in the port hangar deck these days. He's not needed there anyway; he may be a flyboy but he's so far down the roster that he only gets in the cockpit when the cocky nuggets have been blown to tiny little bits, their vaporised atoms scattered in space like supernovae remnants.

Flyboy. Ensign. He thinks he's an ensign, anyway, but he hocked one of his collar pips for booze and the other one's on the floor, pin up, and he won't even feel it puncturing the skin of his bare foot when he staggers towards the door. For now, he leans back in his rack behind the drawn curtain, gently stroking the facets of the hexagonal, half-empty bottle he cradles. It's the nearest approximation possible to a traditional Tauron brandy, made in crude but large quantities on _Pegasus_ and smuggled onto _Galactica_ before the other battlestar was lost. The last time he felt that peculiar but pleasant taste on his tongue was on a sunny day in a Riverwalk café in Caprica City.

It was early morning, and he sat alone at a wobbly metal table outside the quiet café, tipping brandy from a hip flask into his cup of strong, black coffee. Those guys on Aerelon, they were good kids. Pilots he'd come to know well and respect over the months they were stationed together. The order was to leave them behind, casualties of battle. They knew the risks. But John couldn't do that. John didn't leave men behind. He sipped the coffee and stared blankly at the delicate trees lining the avenue as they swayed in the breeze. The black mark from Aerelon, combined with a handful of minor infractions throughout his military career, would surely see him ejected from the Colonial Fleet. Fired. Left behind, a casualty of bureaucracy.

He drinks to the memory.

He drinks to the men he tried to save on Aerelon, to his commanding officer who signed the paperwork for John's dishonourable discharge, to the billions lost in the fall of the Twelve Colonies, to each single digit dropped from President Weir's fleet population tally on the whiteboard in her office, to the CAG, Sumner, who gave John back his wings out of a desperate need to fill vacant Viper cockpits but can no longer look him in the eye, to the XO, Caldwell, who's a drunken, belligerent sonofabitch himself but moved on from John to a more presentable drinking buddy. He drinks to every last frakking one of them and the empty bottle drops from his hand.

The telephone rings. John is the only pilot left in the duty locker, so he hauls himself up to answer it. Things are suddenly bad, worse than bad, and John wonders if any other adjectives are relevant any more. Space is awash with basestars and swarms of Raiders. The Vipers are being launched as the fleet prepares to jump, but somehow there are Centurions on board _Galactica_ and John wonders if he's misinterpreting Communications Officer Chuck's message relayed from CIC, but it's repeated and it's true and it's bad.

They're moving systematically through the ship, painting dark steely hallways crimson as their bullets rip apart delicate human flesh. A documentary film crew, four of CPO McKay's mechanics, marines, a visiting cabal of Gemenon priestesses, Grodin, Ford, Teyla, Dex, _pilots_. Chuck sounds dislocated, the information coming in bursts as if he's relaying the news to John like a commentary as he receives it, words spoken without being processed. Machinegun fire is audible from the duty locker. John runs.

He's suited up and struggling into one of the three remaining Vipers; there used to be a shortage of birds but the Centurions are still marching on and anyone who is capable of pointing a Viper at an enemy and shooting is being bundled into the crafts. The hangar spins and John closes his eyes, cradling his helmeted head in his hands. He is full of chemicals, mixing and fizzing and precipitating as anger.

He can hardly control the Viper and it careens about wildly under his heavy stick-handling, but he can see an advancing parade of Raiders filling his screen and he knows he will kill them all. For everyone he raised a glass to, he will pull the trigger and feel the minute shudders as the belt-fed ammunition spews from the cannons and shreds Cylons.

The sky is on fire. Tracers marking bright projectile paths, missiles connecting with their targets and blooming with violent light, the fireworks of ruptured ships' fuel stocks igniting. Warm amber on a black background, John thinks, like a ribbon of light from a cracked open door hitting the finest Caprican whisky, prismatic glass scattering the fiery brilliance and patterning a dark room.

_Galactica_ is ready to jump, and the remnants of the Viper squad have landed, smoking and crumpled. John doesn't respond to the communications, and now _Galactica_ actual is on, Admiral O'Neill demanding that he return to the ship.

"No," he says. He's not finished. _Galactica_ disappears in a flash, unable to take any more damage from the basestars while they wait for their last Viper to dock. It's another black mark for John, but he cannot leave these machines behind. One bullet for each person he couldn't save, one bullet right through the heart of each Cylon.

As he squeezes the trigger he wonders if anyone will drink to him.

 

**Four.**  
John Sheppard is the Tactical Officer aboard the battlestar _Pegasus_, and Admiral Acastus Kolya has a gun to the XO's head. As part of their ongoing campaign against toaster targets, the Admiral's plan was to launch an attack against a staging area that would cripple a sizable portion of the Cylon fleet, but Colonel Ladon Radim refuses to support the strike. He says it would be foolish and suicidal to launch their limited and vastly outnumbered Viper wing against the fifteen squadrons of Raiders intel suggested were present.

Kolya responds by executing his XO.

John looks on grimly, knuckles whitening as his fists tighten in anger. Not for the first time he thinks back to the chaos of the initial Cylon attack, the splintered Colonial Fleet falling ship by ship, all but _Pegasus_. Surely, something more survived, something more worthwhile than the increasingly monstrous crew of this battlestar. If they truly were the last of their kind, this disparate and desperate band of Colonials, then the Cylons had already wiped out the human race.

Perhaps the next FTL jump would bring a gift from the Gods.

 

**Five.**  
John Sheppard and Rodney McKay are off-duty, and are barely managing to stay awake to share a drink in Joe's Bar. Things have been quiet enough recently for most of the _Galactica_ crew to be back on single shifts but John and Rodney are still pulling doubles to fulfil their duties as CAG and CPO.

Rodney is yawning between every second sentence but still is talking a mile a minute about tiny accidents and minor incompetence and misplaced spanners. Nothing that caused a noticeable blip in the work of his deckhands and specialists, but he needs something to complain about. There's a fine line between enjoying and taking full advantage of a break from Cylon attacks, and becoming dangerously complacent about the fleet's pursuing enemies. He chucks back the whisky in his tumbler and orders another double.

John sticks to beer, preferring to keep a clearer head because he doesn't sleep well when he's been drinking, and there's another long shift ahead after rack time. He welcomes the refreshing hint of lemon in the Aerelon recipe, grinning slightly whenever Rodney's nose crinkles at catching a whiff of citrus. John's been unusually quiet this evening, which Rodney either doesn't notice or chalks up to exhaustion. The Chief is now talking about his work on FTL drive theory. He says his latest batch of simulations with the freshly tweaked equations suggest a method of increasing jump distances by 27% while using the same amount of tylium fuel. John would be interested in what this could mean for the fleet, but he is thinking about darkness.

The darkness of those spots in his memory, strange blackouts he can't seem to fill in with information surreptitiously gleaned from log reports and fellow pilots. He's not yet confided in anyone about these blackouts, or been to see Doc Beckett, but he's considering blurting it out to Rodney. But not tonight. Not yet.

Rodney calls for more drinks and slouches sideways on his stool, leaning on John's left arm to push himself upright again. It feels wrong, and John looks down at his arm, stroking his fingers up and down the brachioradialis muscle as if it held the answer to his confusion in Braille. He finds no secret messages, but two thin wires looped round his wrist that trail up past his elbow. He follows the wires with his fingertips up to his armpit but loses the threads in the folds of his uniform tunic. He feels increasingly uneasy and examines the small device attached to wires directly over the pulse point on his wrist.

It's a tiny black plastic triangle with rounded edges and a silvery coating on the side nestled against his skin. He scrapes at the foil with a thumbnail and Joe's Bar is rocked by a huge explosion.

The shockwave tears apart the metal of the deck, tossing bodies in the air, blowing them apart, ripping them asunder. The force of the explosion's debris has rent a hole in the ship's hull, venting atmosphere from the starboard flight pod. Fire leaps and blood chars and John wakes up.

In a tank. Naked. He splutters and coughs and jerks his head away as hands try to wipe away the thick gel. Initially there is panic as he tries to twist his hands away from their restraints and he can feel globs of gel sliding down his throat and irritating his nasal passages. He looks round and he knows the figures surrounding the tank, yet he doesn't. Number Nine, Number Six, himself, and Rodney. No, Number Five. Rodney is Number Five. John is Number Eight. He stares up at Rodney, whose hands are still on John's face, but this is not Rodney, not John's Rodney. Rodney is in a nearby tank, frozen and silent with shock.

Five smiles crookedly, the way that John has seen Rodney smile a hundred times, sometimes purely for him. "Welcome home. You've done a good job."

"I am not a Cylon," John growls.

The Eight copy on his left side looks concerned, an eerie mirror of a face John has seen so many times in the fogged glass of the pilots' washroom, grimacing with pre-mission anxiety. "How bad is it gonna be this time?" he asks the other skinjobs.

Three, walking over from Rodney's tank, runs a hand through his fluffy hair. "The core corruption in the last attack was quite extensive. It will take time to assess the damage to this one's backup, maybe days. I said that the deep sleeper programming was unstable and that running the loop long term would lead to total archive loss."

"_I am not a Cylon_," John hisses.

Five fixes Three with a glare. "Standing there spouting I-told-you-sos is hardly an effective method of data retrieval. This needs fixed. Now. We need his intel on the Colonial Fleet."

Three huffs and mutters to himself as he walks away. "_Kolem mě jsou jenom idioti_."

John and Rodney are moved to separate recuperation chambers, heavily guarded by impassive Centurions. Hours pass, maybe days, and John sleeps fitfully, tossing and turning and shaking and reliving in dreams his life on _Galactica_ and Caprica and his childhood which he knows was real and warm and true and couldn't be lines of code, just a toaster's fiction. He is covered in a fine sheen of sweat and half tangled in a damp sheet when he is visited by Three. The Cylon seems almost apologetic in his demeanor.

"I have salvaged all I could from your backup data core here on the ship, but it's not much. The update is scheduled soon, so you might experience some disorientation as partial memories return." He pauses, his gaze flickering to the Centurion guard. "I am sorry I could not do more. For you or your Five."

John is left alone with the silent machine once again, and he backs up into the corner of his ethereally lit bunk to the rear of the small room, little more than a storage cupboard for download mistakes. He waits for the invasion into his mind.

He remembers sipping espresso at a Riverwalk café, the pride at receiving his wings at flight school graduation, the soft embraces of many women and many men and CPO Rodney McKay, the glittering view from the top of the Delphi ferris wheel, the horror of the fall of the Twelve Colonies, the taste of buttery popcorn and the roar of the crowd at Buccaneers' games, every bad command decision, every victorious tactic, and every death. He has died so many times, each death and rebirth grating against his chronology, overlapping false memories and insinuating themselves between layers of his past. It doesn't fit, it doesn't follow, and John lets out a strangled sob because maybe he really is a Cylon and maybe he has done terrible things and maybe he has been punished for those transgressions with bullets, blades, asphyxiation and fire, and he cannot keep track of how many times he's awoken to the feel of viscous gel cradling his naked body.

They'll have no choice but to box him now, a mind of mad spliced code and programming errors and deletions. John thinks maybe they'll box Rodney too, though he's had no contact with the Chief since downloading and doesn't know what sort of state he's in. He spends the rest of his umpteenth lifetime wondering who'll be by his bedside when he wakes in _Galactica_'s infirmary, Beckett fussing over the scrapes and concussion he sustained during the explosion. Rodney, he hopes, greeting him with that crooked grin.

* * *

_Kolem mě jsou jenom idioti_ is _I'm surrounded by idiots_ in Czech, if my random intarweb source was correct. :D


End file.
